


Vermin in the Lower Zoo

by daystarsearcher



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, F/M, Horror, Hurt/Comfort, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-26
Updated: 2016-01-26
Packaged: 2018-05-16 08:09:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5820823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daystarsearcher/pseuds/daystarsearcher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if 'The Edge of Destruction' had marked the end of the Doctor's moral ambiguity in a different way, and his character had transitioned not into a hero, but a villain? One who demanded punishment for insubordination, and a price for ferrying two stowaways home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vermin in the Lower Zoo

**Author's Note:**

> It's all the property of the BBC, except the title, which is from Sweeney Todd: "At the top of the whole sit the privileged few/ Making mock of the vermin in the lower zoo/ Turning beauty into filth and greed..."

The cold alien metal of the table bit into Barbara’s back as she lay down, raising gooseflesh along her naked skin. The collar around her neck was just thick enough that it was impossible to rest her head in a comfortable position.

White lights flashed on above the table, and she blinked against the sudden glare.

“Must we do this again?” she asked. Not with any real hope. “Please. We’re very sorry.”

There was no answer from the control booth. Just the whirring as the cameras slowly lowered themselves, and a dull clanking as the mechanical arms extended from the table’s sides.

 _But we didn’t do anything wrong!_ raged the part of her that never forgot that this was unjust, unfair, that they had done nothing but tell him the truth. _Do you realize, you stupid old man…_

“Barbara.” A hand on her shoulder. Ian, naked and collared as well and as nervous as her, even after all this time, even if for his sake she pretended not to see it. “If you’ve changed your mind—we don’t have to go along. We can take our chances. Next time the TARDIS lands—”

“ _No._ ” She shook her head, tears blurring her vision. She grabbed at his hand, squeezed. “No, I want to go home.”

Ian squeezed her hand back, and then carefully set his tie next to the rest of his neatly folded clothes. He’d folded hers as well. He didn’t say, _if he can even get us home_ , and Barbara felt a rush of gratitude so strong that in any just universe it would have shattered the looming white TARDIS walls, the cold sterile surface of the table, the hateful control collars.

Ian clambered up onto the table, swearing under his breath when he banged his knee. He hovered over her, his forehead creased, his eyes wide and worried and a little lost. He tried to give her a smile. “If my students had known there were scientific experiments like this…”

It was a terrible joke, but it was the effort that counted and she smiled back. “Hush, you.”

The tip of a mechanical arm stroked her cheek, ghosted across her lips. Her stomach dropped. 

“Please let us go.” It burst out, the words dizzying as they rocketed out of her mouth without her consent. “Please let us go, we’ve done everything you asked, Susan will be expecting us—“

The electrical shock from the collar was enough to make her cry out, her body arching up against Ian’s in a grotesque parody of lust. Two of the metallic arms gripped her ankles and pull them apart, pinning them to the table’s surface.

She’d clamped down on the words too late. You didn’t mention his granddaughter in this room. You didn’t ever say her name.

“Barbara! Are you all right?” Ian, cradling her face in his hands. Still shaking from the after-effects of the current, and now anger.

“Fine.” The pain would fade, eventually. It would. Barbara gritted her teeth. “I think he’s telling us to get on with it.”

“Tough luck for him, then,” Ian snapped. He twisted his head up to glare at the control booth. “Leave her alone, or else come down here and face me like a man, dammit!”

“Ian!”

Barbara held her breath, but there was no reprisal from the dark control booth. After a few moments, the clamps released her ankles.

Ian took a deep breath and turned back towards her. “All right, then.”

“All right.”

He took another deep breath.

Barbara reached up, ran her fingers through his hair. He leaned into her touch, squeezing his eyes shut like a cat. They were only touching there, her hand on his head, and occasionally her right leg shivering, her knee brushing against his side.

He opened his eyes. They were resigned now, steady. He kissed her forehead. “Where to, this time?”

“Florida, I should think.” She spread her legs wider. “Or perhaps—oh, you choose. Somewhere nice and warm.”

“Florida it is,” he said with a lopsided smile. He shifted his weight and began touching her starting with her shoulders and arms, rubbing warmth into her skin with his strong hands. “Florida. We’re on holiday and we’ve slept in till noon. We’ve the whole beach to ourselves—” 

“How’d we manage that?”

“No idea.” His hands moved to her chest, his caresses brief and perfunctory but no less gentle. “Although the ten pound notes I saw you stuffing into that policeman’s hand might have something to do with it.”

“The cheek,” she retorted. She reached up to stroke the lines of his back, get used to touching him. Kept her breathing even, tried to slow her heart. “You’re buying me a drink for that. Something sweet and tropical with a ridiculous paper umbrella.”

“So it’s warm and sunny and the light is dancing along the waves—“

“And we’ve the whole beach to ourselves as I sip my _very expensive_ drink—”

“And I’m rubbing in your sun cream,” he finished, and she laughed, relaxing slightly against him and quirking an eyebrow to say, _Oh, it’s_ that _sort of beach_ and he almost smirked as he started to move down her body, his hands framing her hips and his face was no longer above her, just the blinding light and the dark faceless window of the booth—

Barbara grabbed his shoulder. “Please—stay up here. On top. I don’t like it when—I don’t care what he says, I don’t like it when he can see me.”

He didn’t remember what she did, didn’t remember that first night when they thought they’d won some moral victory even if the Doctor hadn’t apologized for accusing them of sabotage, when they took their meal from the food machine and went to bed unsuspecting of the Doctor’s plans. He hadn’t woken up the way she had, the drug only half worn off so that the world was fuzzy and her limbs and her voice not her own, the new collar tight and choking around her neck and the Doctor pressed up against her back. His breath hot against the back of her neck, his low, repeated mutterings: _Savages, barbarians…_

He didn’t remember, but Ian complied instantly, raising himself back above her. “It’s just that I don’t want to hurt you—“

“Hands,” she told him, and he nodded. He kissed her cheek as his right hand moved between her legs. Patient and steady and knowing, by now, exactly how to touch her to draw out the right response, to persuade her body to comply despite the lights and table and the cold and the shame like a heavy weight in her stomach.

She reached for him to return the gesture, and found him soft. He made a huffing, apologetic sort of noise against her neck, hang-dog and embarrassed. “Sorry.”

As if he’d done something _wrong_ , if it were somehow his _fault_ for not being aroused at the prospect of being pinned under the Doctor’s gaze like an insect under a magnifying glass. “Oh, Ian,” she said helplessly, and kept touching him, and tried to make that say everything she couldn’t, not while the Doctor was watching.

Eventually he was hard enough to enter her. They moved slowly, carefully, awkwardly; a dance they knew all the steps to yet inevitably fumbled. Even with the preparation, Barbara wasn’t quite wet enough, and it hurt. Ian kept nearly losing his erection, Barbara trying to keep him going with a squeeze of her internal muscles or a touch in a strategic location. The Doctor wouldn’t like it if they had to start over.

The mechanical arms swayed, rose and dipped and turned, the harsh red eyes of those equipped with cameras blinking in the humans’ peripheral vision. Touching down on bare skin, pressing, pulling, stroking and caressing—just taking readings, taking chemical samples, taking temperatures, that was what the Doctor said. _My interest is purely scientific and punitive_ , and if Barbara remembered something contrary then that was just evidence of her feeble human mind, and if both humans felt something grasping and coarse and greedy in the touch of objective titanium and glass and stainless steel then it was simply a projection of their obscene, hormone-addled brains and bodies turning everything they touched into filth…

Ian’s thumb rubbed against the pulse in her wrist. It was just out of visual range of the cameras, just out of sight of the Doctor in the control booth, and she loved him for it. For this one thing they had in these terrible moments that was theirs and theirs alone, small and significant and secret.

He was softening again, and she stretched up to suck at a spot on his neck, and for a moment the problem was alleviated. He was still rubbing his thumb along her pulse point, and she wanted to kiss him for it, but they had agreed. Not on the lips, not here. Not when the Doctor could see, could categorize and analyze it and take it from them and make it his.

“So,” Ian said, a bit out of breath. “Florida.”

“Yes,” she said, resuming the fantasy. “The air smells like the sea and like pineapples, and the waves are blue and green and lap against the sands. We’re all alone, the beach entirely to ourselves…”

He smiled, but it was pained; he was struggling to stay erect. “The sky looks as though it could go on forever, the sky and sea, and it’s just the two of us in paradise and your skin is soft and—“

Barbara saw the mechanical arm rising behind him, its tip gleaming with secreted oil, and in the second it took to realize what was happening her brain froze into two crystal-clear contradictory thoughts: _Warn him/ At least this will be over soon_. The arm dipped out of sight and she opened her mouth, “Ian—”

And his entire body tensed, fingernails cutting into her skin as his eyes flew wide open and a sound ripped out of his throat that was pain and shock and a pig coming to slaughter and nothing that could be called human.

And he came. 

The arms all receded, the whir and click of the winding-down machinery like a gleeful and self-satisfied purring. The air was cold against their sweating skin.

The lock on the door clicked open.

They dressed quickly, Barbara watching Ian out of the corner of her eye as though she was expecting at any moment for him to—what? Fall apart? Disappear? Cup her cheek and kiss her and tell her that everything would be just fine?

He didn’t look at her. Didn’t touch her. He couldn’t, she knew that. Not yet. Later.

The room was vast and echoing and empty, and even though he was still there, knotting his tie, she could feel the absence of him like a hole punched through her ribcage.

The air was cold and chemically stale, and though she still could not see the Doctor, she could feel him watching them. Her blouse itched against her skin as she pulled it over her head, and her cardigan snagged on her wristwatch.

She wanted to weep. 

Later. Yes, later. Barbara knew this, could see the rest of the evening—for what that word was worth, for the Doctor had taken even time from them in this strange, stretching existence aboard his ship—laid out before her. She and Ian would go their separate rooms. She would cry, or perhaps vomit, until she was weak. She would shower and straighten her clothes. She and Ian would meet again in the library to teach Susan her daily lesson, and they would be strong enough to briefly meet each others’ eyes, and Susan would be all smiles and sweetness and laughter and sugar-spun delight, a fey and quicksilver princess who would never know—who must not know, who must not ever be allowed to know—that the god who gave her reign in her kingdom was a wrathful god, gorged on his dark and twisted appetites.

Perhaps she would compliment them again on their matching necklaces.

And later, later even than that, yes, they would be able to touch each other again. 

They would crawl into some nook or cranny that would appear where they had not seen it before, almost as if the ship were taking pity on them, and in that hidden corner they would stay through the night, in chaste embrace. 

Holding each other together, touching and kissing and praying for a way home.


End file.
